Readers, contributors, even our downtrodden staff, we apologise wholly and unreservedly for not telling you before about Carbon Brief.  Because what a website it is, ladies and gentlemen! For here you will find everything you need in what is rapidly becoming the only issue of our soi-disant times, clear and present climate breakdown due to human induced global warming. But do not despair For Carbon Brief [1] has  in depth coverage of climate science, policy, newsletters analysis and a handy Fact Check custom made to refute all the hot air opinions you’ll hear in the Dog and Duck this weekend. Has Mr Trump got it entirely 100% right about the IPCC? Can you think of nine myths about oil in the North Sea? What is really keeping UK energy prices so high (if you’re a mum with a family you might find that last one especially poignant) Answers to these and many more canards are to be found in this excellent section of the website. But of course there is much, much more.

Dear ladies and gentlemen, once more we can only apologise. For we have tried our best, our level best here on Climate change. But to be frank, compared to this lot we  “am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal”, as St Paul memorably observed in his notable e mail to the Corinthians.  From now on we honestly and humbly advise you to check out Carbon Brief wherever and whenever you need facts and balanced reason on the whole catastrophic matter. Teachers in particular might find swarms of subjects for lesson plans. Those enduring social visits from cantankerous relatives, or who have to deal with the opinions of elderly neighbours over the garden fence will find even more. We will end with an even more relevant extract from that same  e mail from theat same wily  old scribe from Damascus:

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” That’s 1 Corinthians 13:12, to you and me.

Even if you’re not a Corinthian,  click on Carbon Brief now. What are you waiting for?

[1] Home – Carbon Brief

#carbon brief #global warming #climate change #fossil fuels #coal #oil #ecological collapse

Europe burns: June 2026 was the hottest June ever recorded in western Europe, driving temperatures to the highest levels seen in more than a century. In France, drought, low humidity and repeated heatwaves have turned forests into kindling; wildfires have already burned 35,400 hectares, four times the usual area for this point in the season, while Spain has lost 55,128 hectares, double its average. Across the continent, extreme heat is desiccating lakes, soils and crops at rates made many times more likely by human‑driven warming. Rivers across Europe are running so shallow that cargo ships are restricted, hydropower is curtailed, and Danube and Rhine river‑boat holidays are being cancelled because the Alps did not produce enough snow to melt into summer water levels.

Beyond Europe, the world’s high places are breaking too. In the Himalayas, the 2026 monsoon outlook warns of a dangerous paradox: long droughts punctuated by sudden cloudbursts, raising the risk of flash floods, landslides, and glacial‑lake outbursts across Nepal, Bhutan, India, and Pakistan. North America is enduring its own climate convulsions. The United States — where the cultural refrain “drill, baby, drill!” still echoes in parts of the political landscape — has been hit repeatedly by record‑strength heat domes, driving temperatures past human‑health thresholds and straining power grids from California to the Midwest. Canada, meanwhile, continues to reel from unprecedented wildfire seasons, with boreal forests burning at scales once considered impossible.

As early as the 1990s, researchers warned that rising temperatures and shifting rainfall would intensify fire regimes, especially in regions where drought and heatwaves coincide. By 2001, the IPCC’s landmark report Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability [1] had already catalogued the pattern: climate change would alter “disturbance regimes” in forests, increasing the frequency and intensity of fires as ecosystems dried and heat extremes sharpened. It noted that major fire events in the 1990s — from the Amazon to Indonesia — were early signals of a climate‑driven shift, and that future warming would make such events more common and more severe. These were predictions, not scare stories, made by scientists who understood the physics, ran the models, and told us plainly what was coming. Remember: making accurate predictions is one of the signs of good thinking. Yet we also remember the barrels of scorn and opprobrium poured upon them by various well‑oiled journalistic and political machines that helped avert any meaningful action.

And the latest predictions? If we continue on our present path, the IPCC projects that by the 2030s and 2040s vast regions of the world will shift into permanent fire weather, with fire seasons lengthening by one to two months in southern Europe, western North America, and Australia. The World Meteorological Organization expects 1.5°C of warming to be locked in during the 2030s [2], a threshold at which extreme heat becomes annual, drought becomes structural, and forests lose their ability to recover between burns. By the 2040s, climate models show Mediterranean Europe facing megafires every few years, Canada’s boreal forests transitioning into a fire‑dominated ecosystem, and the American West experiencing summers where smoke becomes a chronic public‑health hazard, not an occasional crisis. The Himalayas, meanwhile, are projected to lose up to half their glacial mass, destabilising rivers and increasing the risk of catastrophic glacial‑lake floods. None of this is speculative; it is the median outcome of the world we are building. The scientists have already run the numbers. Will you still let a politician or a journalist tell you these scientists have been wrong all along? [3][4]

[1] Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability — IPCC

 [2] WMO Global Climate Update; IPCC AR6

[3] Royal Society: Evidence & Causes of Climate Change

 [4] IPCC AR6: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability

#Nepal # Bhutan # India #Pakistan#United States #canada #spain #france #climate change #fossil fuel #global warming #alps #snow

We once asked someone who is far more intelligent than we are: “what is the secret of intelligence-what do intelligent people really do?” And he replied, “they pick out what is really important from what is merely important,” And in that spirit we urge you gentle readers to approach this story from Nature Briefing with due attention. Put it, as t’were in context with the doings of Mr Trump , the England cricket team and the various rescued felines who will flicker across your screen this morning. All important, no doubt. Yet this is the story which will affect you, your children and their childrens’ children for decades to come. Or maybe not: for it has the potential to ensure that such generations do not exist They’ve  called it We’ve just had the hottest 11 years on record

The years from 2015–2025 have been the hottest stretch on record, according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization. For the first time, the report includes a measure called Earth’s energy imbalance — the difference between incoming energy from the Sun and the amount radiated back into space — which is at its highest level since observations started in 1960. And in 2024, the latest year that global figures are available, atmospheric CO₂ reached its highest concentration in two million years. “In this age of war, climate stress is also exposing another truth: our addiction to fossil fuels is destabilizing both the climate and global security,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in a statement.

Nature | 5 min read
Reference: State of the Global Climate 2025 report

There are many sorrowful things in here gentle readers, but we advise you to read them for yourselves. What actually scares us is this. Humans seem really good at identifying a perceived threat from other groups of humans. And reacting to it with hysterical fear and anger. They seem less good at perceiving and contending with long term insidious but ineluctable threats that threaten them all with extinction. Is this an actual cognitive defect of the human mind? In which case what chances will Natural Selection offer us in the next few decades?

#climate change #global warming #fossil fuels #oil #middle east #pollution #human extinction

We know that rising levels of carbon dioxide are driving climate change. We know the mechanism, we know the statistics, and people all across the world are feeling the consequences in floods, fires, crop failures and migrations. But has CO₂ changed the climate before? More pertinently has human meddling with this potent greenhouse gas already unleashed a disaster or so? To our astonishment, some people think it has  Stand by for an amazing idea we got from the BBC podcast  In Our Time [1] of which more below.

When Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492 it was not to an empty, underpopulated hemisphere. Both American continents contained thriving populations of agriculturalists. Now, 1492 was indeed the start of huge exchanges of many things-foods, cultures, languages-between Old World and New. But among the earliest and most significant were European diseases like smallpox and measles to which the American populations had no resistance whatsoever. The result was a catastrophic mortality which carried off between 80 and 90% of them.[2] The abandoned farms and croplands quickly reverted to nature. Meaning a sudden massive capture of carbon dioxide which began to cool the planet quickly, leading to the famous Little Ice Age which reached its coldest in the  early Seventeenth Century.

And the evidence ? The Little Ice Age is an incontrovertible fact. [3] Ice core samples and climate records indicate the early 17^th century as suffering some of the coldest decades in recorded history. But correlation is not cause, as we always say at this blog. Overall, it looks as if the trend towards the dip had started centuries before, and the recovery was still going on centuries afterwards. The cooling may well have been regional rather than global and there is strong evidence to suggest that other factors such as volcanoes and solar cycles may have played their part.  However, that CO₂ is indeed such a potent greenhouse gas makes its role as a contributor to the Little Ice Age all too  plausible. And that is what worries us about levels of the stuff shooting up so dramatically in our own times. Although not proven to the levels of certainty like tigers bite and smoking gives you cancer, we think there is enough here for further research, both by scientists and by you, gentle reader. And now on to our thanks.

Because In Our Time,now presented by the urbane Misha Glenny, is one of the greatest cornucopias of intellectual treasure you will find. gentle readers. By spending an hour in its company once a week you will discover the most eclectic range of fine subjects -Science, History, Art, literature, what have you, all presented by leading experts at Tertiary education level or above(see LSS 9 6 22) In an age where so much media chases sensation over substance, its very existence is a reminder that rationality and intelligence still have a place. And we know we have that on the Highest Authority: read this if you don’t believe us:

Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding. For the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver. And the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her

Proverbs 3 12-15

[1] BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, The Columbian Exchange

[2] Columbian exchange – Wikipedia

[3] Reconciling ice core CO2 and land-use change following New World-Old World contact

#global warming #pandemic #columbus #in out Time #little ice age